Would PR have prevented more austerity?

“The current system is grossly unfair in allocating seats from votes but, more importantly, PR is the key to giving a political voice to the millions of people who reject austerity.”Mark Serwotka, 18 May 2015

He’s not the only person to call for an end to first-past-the-post elections, which do not allocate parliamentary seats proportionally compared to the number of votes a party wins.

In a speech yesterday, Mr Serwotka suggested that a system of proportional representation (PR) would mean people who vote against the austerity plans of some of the leading parties would get more of a voice. Is that right?

The analysis

Here’s what the balance of power would look like if we used the D’Hondt method of PR, a system used to allocate parliamentary seats in dozens of other countries:

There’s obviously a big difference between this and what we actually ended up with on 8 May:

So it’s possible to have some sympathy with Mr Serwotka when he says the current system is “grossly unfair” – although this and other arguments were made in favour of switching to an alternative vote in 2011, and people rejected the change. [See update below].

It’s less clear that people who opposed austerity would have been able to exert any kind of decisive influence in a parliament elected through PR.

Let’s have a look at the first graph again. No party would have the 323 seats needed for a working majority in parliament, so some kind of coalition of power-sharing deal between two or more parties would have been inevitable.

The only two-party coalition that works numerically is a Conservative/Ukip coalition.

Both parties appeared to rule out such a deal before the election, but someone would have had to try to form a government.

It’s difficult to see how the parties perceived as being the most anti-austerity – the SNP and the Greens – could have had any power. A Labour/SNP/Green coalition would not have had enough seats for a majority under PR.

Like Ukip, the Greens would have had a lot more seats to show for the share of the popular vote they won on 7 May. But the SNP would have had a significantly smaller bloc of MPs.

And then there is a huge argument we could have about whether a vote for the SNP was really a vote against austerity.

While the party certainly claimed to offer an alternative to the public spending cuts proposed by both the Conservatives and Labour, the Institute of Fiscal Studies said: “The SNP’s stated plans do not necessarily match their anti-austerity rhetoric.”

In fact, the nationalists’ plans implied “the same reduction in borrowing over the next parliament as for Labour, although the reduction in borrowing under their plans would be slower”, the think-tank said.

The SNP denied it was misleading voters, saying the IFS had made a number of incorrect assumptions in its calculations.

During the Scottish independence referendum campaign, the SNP made the prospect of cuts to the NHS a major theme.

But both the IFS and the Nuffield Trust said Scottish governments had spent less on health than England and had failed to pass on all the money available to the NHS under the Barnett funding formula.

The verdict

For years FactCheck predicted that Ukip voters would be disappointed with how many seats the party would win despite getting a significant slice of the popular vote on 7 May.

Now calls for reform are coming from the left too. But PR would not necessarily have delivered the anti-austerity message referred to by Mark Serwotka.

In fact the most logical outcome of a 2015 election decided by PR would have been a Tory/Ukip coalition.

The SNP bloc would have been smaller. The Greens – arguably the only party who unambiguously rejected austerity – would have won many more seats but would have struggled to form part of a government.

A PCS union spokesman said: “It’s illuminating to look how much more fairly votes would have been allocated under a more proportional system, and serves to highlight just how outdated first past the post is. But that’s only half the story, what we’re also saying is that we believe FPTP skews voting patterns so changing the system would also change how people vote.”

[Update: this blog was changed on 21/05/2015 to amend the phrase “this and other arguments were made in favour of switching to a more proportional alternative vote”. We should have said that, while some supporters of AV argued it was more proportional, this was debatable. In fact, analysis suggested AV would have delivered a less proportional result in some UK elections. Thanks to readers Phil Edwards and Scott Berry for pointing this out.]

14 reader comments

Nicksays:

You’ve made the assumption that people would have voted the same whether the system were FPTP or PR.
FPTP encourages people to vote tactically – often to vote for their least-worst candidate rather than their actual favourite candidate. The spread of votes would have been different had they been under a PR system from the outset.

Exactly. The Greens in particular were squeezed by ‘gotta keep the Tories out’ tactical voting. Our policies score well on the policy-comparison website like voteforpolicies, but our vote is decimated by tactical voting.

I don’t thimk much of d’Hondt anyway – what’s wrong with just straight proportional? – get 10% of the vote and you get 10% of the seats. The
only argument is that it makes for coalitions, but the article makes it clear that a mega-coalition would have been needed in any case.

Not for the first time Mr Serwotka states what he believes rather than what is likely to be reality. It seems to me that there are stronger arguments for some form of PR based on representing the views of the electorate, encouraging greater participation, preventing an “elective dictatorship” based on less than a quarter of the electorate and 37% of the votes cast.

The pretence that what we have had over the last five years is ‘austerity’ – we had a government spending billions a month more than it had coming in – would surely grate on people in Greece and Spain.

We’ve moved mildly towards living within our means but are still basically doing fair-weather Keynesianism.

The IFS made the entirely reasonable mistake of taking the SNP manifesto at face value. The SNP saw and was OK with their analysis until it was published alongside the others. They then complained that what they said in their manifesto wasn’t a fair basis for comparison, because they had assumed a smaller amount of income from chasing tax dodgers than other parties. Fair enough, but (1) it probably didn’t affect the conclusion that they weren’t that different to Labour (after five years, Labour levelled out but SNP cuts continued); and (2) their manifesto calculation also hid some amazing creative accountancy – they inflate their spending may counting depreciation twice (!) and while money they borrow immediately adds to their spending power, they don’t bother including the resultant debt until the following year. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32480910)

“PR is the key to giving a political voice to the millions of people who reject austerity.” – That is not the same as saying “if the last election’s results were converted to PR, then the result would be an overturning of austerity politics.”

It is erroneous to assume people would vote the same way under a PR system as they did under FPTP. Tactical voting is unnecessary in PR; and many alienated voters who know voting for third-tier candidates under FPTP is pointless will simply not vote at all in those circumstances. It is quite possible (if not likely) that a change to PR would result in different ballots being cast as well as potentially greater voter turnout.

Also, equating “giving a voice” to people whose votes are effectively meaningless under FPTP is not the same as “that voice having an effective majority and overturning the policies of all the other parties”; but it *does* put pressure on coalitions to compromise to ensure a safe passing rather than risking the failure to enact a bill due to back-bench defectors, etc.

this and other arguments were made in favour of switching to a more proportional alternative vote

But AV isn’t more proportional – it can actually produce less proportional results. (Look no further than Australia, where in 2010 the two main parties took 81% of the vote and 96% of seats.) Switching to AV would have been good for second-placed parties, bad for everyone else. I voted No to AV – under which, incidentally, the Tories would have benefited from an awful lot of UKIP second preferences in the election just gone – precisely because I thought it would make PR harder to achieve.

Precisely. The reason this and any future “referenda” fail is because the governing parties choose to ask a sneaky question. They provide a choice between two options no-one except they want…. Surprisingly (or not!) they get the answer people want “no change”.
Now let’s see what “options” the UK gets in the EU referendum….

Other than Farage who says UKIP voters are disappointed? D’hondt may be fair to parties in allocating seats to votes cast but the expense of constituency representation and accountability.
Voters who switched from Liberal Democrat to UKIP did so probably knowing they were punishing the Lib Dems, who are masters at promoting tactical voting. So were they backing UKIP or sacking LibDems?
How can one sack a Neil Hamilton or George Galloway with the D’hondt system? Where is the incentive for MPs to actually speak up for constituents interests?
Finally, the missing fact check is that the 2011 referendum rejected PR. UKIP and the Greens lost the argument then and the issue is closed.

Under PR, the Tories would have been massively defeated in 2010 by a combination (and possibility of coalition) of Labour and LibDems, both of whom had no commitment to austerity at the time. Simply put, more people by far voted against austerity than for it.

So the question of “more” austerity wouldn’t have arisen in the first place.

Also, as a by-the-by, this shows Osborne’s “mandate” for austerity as the lie it has always been.

‘Mr Serwotka suggested’ Did he claim or not? The article then bases it’s argument upon the D’Hondt method. Does Mr Serwotka claim this method? Inferences and suggestions don’t provide a factual verdict. What is the purpose of article as it clearly doesn’t evaluate it’s claim.